Patchwork 3D Community 2021.1 X5

Operations on Lighting Layers

Tip

There is a maximum limit to the number of lighting layers. The total number of layers must not exceed 32. Once you have reached this limit, no additional layers can be created.

Tip

To change the position of a layer in the list, drag and drop it on a new position.

The main buttons are available below the list of layers:

Icon

Description

image808.png

New lighting layer.

duplicate_lighting_1.png

Duplicate lighting layer.

image810.png

Add new lighting color to the layer.

image323.png

Rename lighting layer.

image811.png

Import lighting layer.

export_lighting_1.png

Export lighting layer.

delete_lighting_1.png

Delete lighting layer.

The buttons to rename, duplicate, export or delete a layer affect only the selected layer. When multiple layers are selected, these buttons only affect the leader of the selection. The leader layer has a dotted border and is highlighted in light gray.

Each lighting layer has its own set of active values for modulation color, intensity, visibility, and configuration use. The active set of color values is marked with a check in the visibility column in the Layers list. When more than one layer is visible, the active values for each layer are combined.

The columns to the right of the name of the layer display the value of each of these properties. To change the value, click on its representation in the corresponding column.

Property

Description

Modulation color

The color of the lightmap is multiplied by the color of the layer. This color is always white by default. Click on the colored rectangle to open the color chooser and modify the color.

Intensity

The intensity of the lighting can be modified. You can set it to 0 or to any positive decimal value. By default, the intensity is set to 1, which represents a normal lighting.

Visibility

Illumination layers can be visible or hidden. During the analysis of the stack of layers, hidden layers are skipped. New layers are visible by default. Lights in a visible layer are shown in blue in the viewport. Lights in an invisible layer produce no effect and are displayed in red in the viewport.

Configuration

If the layer is used as a target of a configuration rule, the icon config_layer16x16_1.png

is displayed. Clicking on this icon will select the corresponding rule in the Configuration Editor.

You can also right-click on a lighting layer in order to copy its lightmaps to another layer in the list.

Tip

When you open a database created with a version of Patchwork 3D prior to version 6.0, each lighting set is converted to a lighting layer. To maintain the original settings, the layer that corresponds to the active lighting set is visible; all of the other layers are hidden.

Tip

When a new lightmap is first calculated for a surface, the other lightmaps for this surface may also need to be recalculated if they were generated with a version of Patchwork 3D prior to version 6.0.